Friday drop deadline. Repeat announcement. This Friday, October 2, is the last day to drop the class with an automatic grade of W on your transcript. For more information, see yesterday's announcements.
Commenting on Storybooks. Every week from now through Week 12 of the semester, you will be commenting on people's writing at their Storybooks (thanks to those of you who have done this week's assignment already - great!). During these weeks as you comment on people's Storybooks, please provide as much detailed, specific feedback as possible! People will be writing and re-writing their Storybook pages all semester long, so specific feedback is really valuable. It's nice to get compliments, but it is also really good to get feedback about what things could be improved. So, do not hesitate to say when something is confusing, or when something seems repetitious, or if you think something is important is missing. Let people know when they use words that you do not understand, or if there is background information you need - about geography, history, culture, anything at all. Every semester, students tell me that they wish they had received more detailed feedback on their Storybooks, rather than just generic compliments. So definitely give compliments about things you like, but please try to provide detailed feedback about the writing and webpage design. Everybody has the rest of the semester to turn their Storybooks into something really great, and your feedback is an important part of that process! Plus, being able to give good feedback is a great skill to have, and it's a skill you can develop through practice. So, try to be a really careful and attentive reader of each Storybook you visit so that you can give detailed, useful feedback in your comments.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in after on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, your assignment is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. Thursday at noon is the deadline for late Week 5 assignments. Friday at noon is the deadline if you want to get comments back from me about your Storybook assignment before the weekend.
October 1: E.B. White. Today, October 1, marks the death in the year 1985 of the American author, E.B. White, the author of such marvelous children's books as Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. You might also recognize his name as being the "White" in the famous guide to English composition, The Elements of Style, a book originally written by William Strunk in 1918, and substantially updated and edited by E.B. White in 1959, so that the book is often referred to as "Strunk & White." You can read more about E.B. White's biography in this Wikipedia article; meanwhile, here is a book cover for the translation of Charlotte's Web into Latin: Tela Charlottae!
